Unified Payments Interface goes live on Samsung Pay

MUMBAI: People having Samsung Pay in their smartphones but could still not use it since their bank had not partnered with the South Korean smartphone maker, are now all set to access it through Unified Payments Interface, the peer to peer instant payment platform run by National Payments Corporation of India.

Samsung Pay, through its partnership with NPCI and Axis Bank, will now have access to all the 44 banks which are live on UPI. As of now the company had only activated seven bank’s cards and Paytm for mobile wallets.

“As of now there were seven banks live on Samsung Pay but with this partnership all 44 major bank customers with a Samsung phone which supports the payment means can use it,” said Dilip Asbe, chief operating officer of NPCI.

Samsung Pay allows customers to just open the app with a swipe and pay through cards, Paytm or UPI by a touch on the point of sales (PoS) device thereby adding a fast, convenient and safe mode of payment.

“Samsung Pay uses magnetic stripe based payments which is recognised by all PoS devices thereby allowing it to be accepted across the digital payments infrastructure of the country and also does not require any data connection at the time of making the payment,” said Sanjay Razdan, director, India Commercialisation Group (Product Planning) Samsung.

Axis Bank which has been actively participating in the digital payments revolution of the country is betting big on UPI and Samsung Pay adds another level of ease of payments for its customers.

“We have already acquired 2 lakh merchants on UPI and have reported around Rs 1000 crore worth of transactions on our UPI app and around 26 lakh downloads,” said Rajiv Anand, head of retail at Axis Bank. “Once Samsung Pay comes onto the cheaper phones customer adoption is only going to increase.”

While Samsung Pay is a revolutionary mode of payment as of now it is only available in select high end models of the company. Razdan, said that the company will look at adoption and will eventually introduce it in cheaper phones as well.